Communication, project oversight, and task management are all integral to the success of any business. There are a lot of great options out there that each have their own advantages and disadvantages, but one of the most prevalent (and flexible) options is Slack.
Slack is, first and foremost, a dedicated platform for communication. In their own words, Slack “creates alignment and shared understanding across your team, making you more productive, less stressed, and just a little bit happier.” We can’t provide anything more than anecdotal evidence to corroborate that last bit, but Slack has definitely helped us to organize our office!
Let’s Chat!
Slack is all about chat. The first thing you’ll see when you set up Slack is a message from a chatbot (no, it’s not spam! More on bots in Slack in a bit…), plunging you headfirst into the world of chat. Slack lets you set up a custom domain (e.g. business.slack.com) that you can add users to.
In addition to direct messaging, which is useful for quick 1-on-1 communications, Slack specializes in project management. Within your business’ Slack domain, you can create individual channels. Typically, you’d use these channels for specific projects. For instance, you might have a channel for local SEO and another one for PPC and another for product development.
You can choose which users have access to each channel, which helps keeps office communication organized and prevents off-topic requests from cluttering things up. Within the channel, you can tag users, which is a great way to get a colleague’s attention or assign a task!
Bringing Your Friends and Family
So Slack is great for chat, but what about all of the other office-related tasks that you and your team need access to every day? One of our favorite things about Slack is that it’s robustly open-ended and flexible.
The universal popularity of Slack in the workplace means that there are a ton of great integrations to get all of your favorite apps and functionalities working in Slack. Want to have task notifications from Basecamp or Teamwork pushed to Slack channels? Done. Want to share your Google Drive files? Easy. Want to send a humorous-yet-relevant GIF to your coworkers? Get Giphy.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Slack isn’t always perfect, unfortunately. While app integration can frequently buy you the flexibility and functionality that you need, sometimes, it just won’t work.
This can be a huge roadblock for businesses that already have an established protocol for project management and staff/client communication. If your current project management system won’t integrate with Slack, you can actually end up making things more difficult by introducing a new system that isn’t replacing the old one.
Take a look at your current setup and the available API integrations with Slack and make a decision that will help you to steamline your business’ communication and project management process!